Boreas Rising:White Nationalism & the Geopolitics of the Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis, Part 1

For a half-century, we nationalists stood with the “West” in its struggle against the Asiatic Marxism of the Soviet bloc. There was little problem then distinguishing between our friends and our foes, for all evil was situated in the collectivist East and all virtue in the liberal West.

Today, things are much less clear. Not only has the Second American War on Iraq revealed a profound geopolitical divide within the West, the social-political order associated with it now subverts our patrimony in ways no apparatchik ever imagined. Indeed, it seems hardly exaggerated to claim that Western elites (those who Samuel Huntington calls the “dead souls”)[1] have come to pose the single greatest threat to our people’s existence.

For some, this threat was discovered only after 1989. Yet as early as the late forties, a handful of white nationalists, mainly in Europe, but with the American Francis Parker Yockey at their head, realized that Washington’s postwar order, not the Soviet Union, represented the greater danger to the white biosphere.[2] Over the years, particularly since the fall of Communism, this realization has spread, so that a large part of Europe’s nationalist vanguard no longer supports the West, only Europe, and considers the West’s leader its chief enemy.[3]

For these nationalists, the United States is a kind of anti-Europe, hostile not only to its motherland, but to its own white population. The Managerial Revolution of the thirties, Jewish influence in the media and the academy, the rise of the national security state and the military-industrial complex have all had a hand in fostering this anti-Europeanism, but for our transatlantic cousins its roots reach back to the start of our national epic. America’s Calvinist settlers, they point out, saw themselves as latter-day Israelites, who fled Egypt (Europe) for the Promised Land. Their shining city on the hill, founded on Old Testament, not Old World, antecedents, was to serve as a beacon to the rest of humanity. America began—and thus became itself—by casting off its European heritage. The result was a belief that America was a virtuous land, dedicated to liberty and equality, while Europe was mired in vice, corruption, and tyranny. Then, in the eighteenth century, this anti-Europeanism took political form, as the generation of 1776 fashioned a new state based on Lockean/Enlightenment principles, which were grafted onto the earlier Calvinist ones. As these liberal modernist principles came to fruition in the twentieth century, once the Christian, Classical vestiges of the country’s “Anglo-Protestant core” were shed, they helped legitimate the missionary cosmopolitanism of its corporate, one-world elites, and, worse, those extracultural, anti-organic, and hedonistic influences hostile to the European soul of the country’s white population.[4]

This European nationalist view of our origins ought to trouble white nationalists committed to a preserving America’s European character, for, however slanted, it contains a not insignificant kernel of truth. My intent here is not to revisit this interpretation of our history, but to look at a development that puts it in a different racial perspective. So as not to wander too far afield, let me simply posit (rather than prove) that the de-Europeanizing forces assailing America’s white population are only superficially rooted in the Puritan heritage. The Low Church fanatics who abandoned their English motherland and inclined America to a biblical enterprise, despite their intent, could not escape their racial nature, which influenced virtually every facet of early American life. Indeed, the paradox of America is that it began not simply as a rejection but also as a projection of Europe. Thus, beyond their ambivalent relationship to Europe, Americans (until relatively recently) never had any doubt that their race and High Culture were European. As such, they showed all the defining characteristics of the white race, taming the North American continent with little more than rifles slung across their backs, and doing so in the European spirit of self-help, self-reliance, and fearlessness. As Francis Parker Yockey writes: “America belongs spiritually, and will always belong to the [European] civilization of which it is a colonial transplantation, and no part of the true America belongs to the primitivity of the barbarians and fellaheen outside of this civilization.”[5]

As long, then, as Americans were of Anglo-Celtic (or European) stock, with racially conscious standards, their Calvinist or liberal ideology remained of secondary importance. Our present malaise, I would argue, stems less from these ideological influences (however retarding) than from a more recent development—the Second World War—whose world-transforming effects were responsible for distorting and inverting our already tenuous relationship to Europe. For once our motherland was conquered and occupied (what the apologists of the present regime ironically refer to as its “liberation”) and once the new postwar system of transnational capital was put in place, a New Class of powers with a vested interest in de-Europeanizing America’s white population was allowed to assume command of American life. The result is the present multiracial system, whose inversion of the natural order negates the primacy of our origins and promises our extinction as a race and a culture. The only possibility of escaping its annihilating fate would seem, then, to be another revolutionary transformation of the world order—one that would throw the existing order into crisis and pose an alternative model of white existence. The “Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis” formed during the recent Iraq war, I believe, holds out such a possibility.

Genesis of an Axis

As part of its Mobiles Géopolitique series, the Franco-Swiss publisher L’Age d’Homme announced in April 2002 the release of Paris-Berlin-Moscou: La voie de l’indépendance et de la paix (Paris-Berlin-Moscow: The Way of Peace and Independence). Authored by Henri de Grossouvre, the youngest son of a prominent Socialist party politician, and prefaced by General Pierre Marie Gallois, France’s premier geostrategic thinker, Paris-Berlin-Moscou argued that Europe would never regain its sovereignty unless it threw off American suzerainty and did so in alliance with Russia.

In recommending a strategic alliance between France, Germany, and Russia for the sake of a Eurasian federation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Grossouvre’s thesis seemed entirely utopian. For although the prospect of such an alliance had long animated the imagination of revolutionary nationalists, it seemed more fantasy than possibility, even when proposed by a well-connected and reputable member of the governing elites. Fantasy, however, rather unexpectedly took hold of the international arena. Within months of the book’s publication, its thesis assumed a life of its own, as the new Likudized administration in Washington started beating the drums for another war on Iraq.

The axis and the war it sought to avoid will be looked at in the following sections. Here, a few words on Grossouvre’s book are in order, for, besides being one of those novel cases where life seemed to imitate art, it stirred the European public, was extensively reviewed, led to the organization of several international conferences attended by diplomats, military leaders, and parliamentarians, and culminated in a website with over two thousand pages of documentation.[6] Its effect on the European—especially on the anti-liberal—spirit has been profound. If the axis it proposes is stabilized as an enduring feature of the international order (and much favors that), a realignment as significant as 1945 could follow.

Paris-Berlin-Moscou begins by acknowledging the common values linking America and Europe, the so-called Atlantic community, as well as the US role in guaranteeing European security during the Cold War. On both these counts, the author’s establishment ties are evident, for no anti-liberal views the Atlantic relationship in quite such uncritical terms. Nevertheless, in arguing that these two factors no longer justify Europe’s dependence on the United States, he breaks with the prevailing system (or at least what was the prevailing system) of strategic thought.

In Grossouvre’s view, Europe’s geopolitical relationship to the United States was fundamentally altered between 1989 and 1991, when Eastern Europe threw off its Soviet yoke, Germany reunified, and Russia called off the Communist experiment begun in 1917. Then, as Europe’s strategic dependence on the US came to an end, so too did its heteronomy.[7] Moreover, it is only a matter of time, Grossouvre predicts, before Russia recovers, China develops, and US power is again challenged. In the meantime, US efforts to perpetuate its supremacy, defend its neo-liberal system of global market relations, and stifle potential threats to its dominance are transforming it into a force of international instability. But even if this were not the case, Grossouvre contends that Europeans would still need to separate themselves from America’s New World Order (NWO), for their independence as a people is neither a luxury nor a vanity, but requisite to their survival.[8] For as Carl Schmitt contends, it is only in politically asserting itself that a people truly exists—conscious of its place in history, oriented to the future, and secure in its identity.[9]

Europe’s ascent—and here Grossouvre most distinguishes himself from the reigning consensus—will owe little to the European Union (EU). Although its GNP is now approaching that of the US; its share of world imports and exports is larger; its manufacturing capacity and productivity are greater; its population is larger, more skilled, and better educated; its currency, the euro, sounder; and its indebtedness qualitatively lower, the EU does not serve Europe in any civilizational sense.[10] Its huge unwieldy bureaucracy serves only Mammon, which means it lacks a meaningful political identity and hence the means to play an international role commensurate with its immense economic power. It indeed caricatures the “European idea,” representing a technocratic economism without roots and without memory, focused on market exchanges and financial orthodoxies that are closer in spirit to America’s neo-liberal model than to anything native to Europe’s own tradition. (As one French rightist argues, “Every time the technocrats in Brussels speak, they profane the idea of Europe.”)[11] The EU’s growth has, in fact, gone hand in hand with the weakening of its various member states—and the corresponding failure to replace them with a continental or federal alternative.[12] Given its current enlargement to twenty-five members, political unity has become an even more remote prospect, particularly in that many of the new East European members lack any sense of the European idea.

A strong centralized state, however, is key to Europe’s future. Since the Second World War, power is necessarily continental: Only a Großraum (large space), a geopolitically unified realm animated by a “distinct political idea,” has a role to play in today’s world.[13] Yet even with the dissolution of the East-West bloc, a continental state is not likely to emerge from the EU’s expanding market system. If earlier state-building is any guide (think of Garibaldi’s Italy, Kara-George’s Serbia, Pearse’s Ireland, or Washington’s America), political unification requires a vision, a mobilizing project, emanating from a history of blood and struggle. As Jean Thiriart writes: “One does not create a nation with speeches, pious talk, and banquets. One creates a nation with rifles, martyrs, jointly lived dangers.”[14] For Grossouvre, this mobilizing vision is De Gaulle’s Grande Europe: a political-civilizational Großraum pivoted on a Franco-German confederation (encompassing Charlemagne’s Francs de l’Ouest et Francs de l’Est), allied with Russia, and forged in opposition to the modern Carthage.

The three great continental peoples, he believes, constitute the potential “core” around which a politically federated Europe will coalesce. Like De Gaulle, who refused to accept his country’s defeat in 1940 and who fought all the rest of his life against the conquerors of 1945, Grossouvre views the entwined cultures of the French, Germans, and Russians as fundamentally different from les Anglo-Saxons (the English and the Americans), whose thalassocratic, Low Church, and market-based order favors a rootless, economic definition of national life. Accordingly, for most of her history, with the tragic exception of the 1870–1940 period, France’s great enemy was “perfidious Albion,” not Germany.[15] Then, after 1945, this larger historical relationship was resumed, as numerous cooperative ventures succeeded in blunting nationalist antagonisms—to the point that war between them is now inconceivable.[16] Finally, in 1963, when De Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer signed the Treaty of Elysée, their reconciliation was formalized on the basis of an institutionalized system of social, economic, and political collaborations. Their supranational commitment to Europe has since had a powerful synergetic effect, influencing virtually every significant measure undertaken in the name of continental unity. The complementary nature of these closely related peoples has, in fact, triumphed over the political disunity that came with the Treaty of Verdun (843).[17] While a confederation between France and Germany is probably still on the distant horizon, the history of the last 60 years suggests that their national projects are converging.[18] Until then, they are likely to continue to speak with a single voice, for France and Germany are more than two states among the EU’s twenty-five. In addition to being the crucible of European civilization, their combined populations (142 million), their economic power (41 per cent of the EU), and, above all, their capacity to transcend national interests make them special—the nucleus, the motor, the vanguard of a potentially united Europe. Whatever political organization the EU eventually achieves will undoubtedly be one of their doing.

A somewhat different convergence is also under way in the East. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany’s ensuing reunification shifted Europe’s center of gravity eastward. The EU’s enlargement to Eastern Europe this year moved it even farther in this direction. The consolidation of Europe’s eastward expansion hinges, though, on Russia, whose white, Christian people, as the historian Dieter Groh argues, represents one of the great primeval stirrings of the European conscience.[19] (It was the Roman Catholic Church, in its schism with Orthodox Christianity in 1054, not Russia’s history, culture, or racial disposition that kept it from being recognized as a European nation.) France has ancient ties with Russia and today shares many of the same geopolitical interests. But it is Germany that is now most involved in Russian life. She is Russia’s chief trading partner, her banks are the chief source of Russian investment capital, and her 1800 implanted entrepreneurs the leading edge of Russian economic development.[20] Thanks to these ties, along with bimonthly meetings between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder, Russia is presently engaged in numerous joint ventures with the EU. Together, they have put seven communications satellites into orbit, developed a global positioning system (Galileo) to rival the American one (GPS), signed numerous agreements in the field of aerospace research, given one another consultative voice in the other’s military operations, upgraded and expanded the roads, canals, and railways linking them, brokered a series of deals related to gas and energy, and established an elaborate system of cultural exchanges. Visa-free travel between Russia and the EU is expected by 2007. And though Russia is too big to be integrated into the EU, she is nevertheless developing relations with it that portend ones of even greater strategic significance.

Russia also sees its future in Europe. Since the collapse of Communism and the imposition of what critical observers characterize as a “Second Treaty of Versailles,” it has been on life-support.[21] The economy is in shambles, the state discredited, society afflicted with various pathologies, and its former empire shattered. The appointment of Vladimir Putin in 1999 and his subsequent election as president in 2000 and again in 2004 represent a potential turnaround (even if he is not the ideal person to lead Russia). Full recovery is probably still far off, but it has begun and Europe—its capital, markets, and expertise—is necessary to it. Putin also believes Europe’s growing estrangement from America’s unilateral model of hegemony will eventually lead it into a collective security pact with Russia.[22] Having distanced himself from the pro-American regime of the corrupt Yeltsin, whose liberal market policies were an excuse to plunder the accumulated wealth of the Russian people, and having had his various efforts at rapprochement rebuffed by the Bush administration (which continues to encroach on Russia’s historical spheres of interest), this Deutsche im Kreml now looks to exploit his German connections to gain a wedge in European affairs.[23]

His Eurocentric policies are already assuming strategic form, for Russia’s vast oil reserves have the potential of satisfying all of Europe’s energy needs. (As russophobes say, Russia will build her hegemony in Europe with pipelines.) To consolidate these emerging East-West exchanges, Russia has recently received a €400 million grant to modernize its institutional, legal, and administration apparatus to accord with the EU’s. At the same time, tariffs on Russian imports have been slashed (50 percent of Russian exports now go to the EU) and the EU is sponsoring Russia’s admission to the World Trade Organization. Putin’s arrest of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the principal proponents of US-style “casino capitalism,” and the seizure of his massive Yukos oil concern, the resignation of the last Yeltsin holdovers, especially Alexander Voloshin; and an ongoing series of internal reforms, however incomplete, represent further steps toward a restoration of Russian state power.[24] Finally, Russia possesses the military capacity, even in its debilitated state, to guarantee Europe’s security, for in a period when America’s “new liberal imperialism” runs roughshod over European concerns, threatening endless conflicts detrimental to their interests, Russia suddenly becomes a credible defense alternative.[25]

Grossouvre concludes that an axis based on France’s political leadership, Germany’s world class economy, and Russia’s military might represent the potential nucleus of a future Eurasian state. Five distinct advantages, he argues, would follow from such a rapprochement: It would guarantee Europe’s independence from America, correct certain imbalances in the globalization process, enhance the EU’s security, solve its energy needs, and complement the different qualities of its allied members. If such an axis draws the chief continental powers into a more enduring alliance, it will inevitably reshape the international order, making the white men of the North—the Boreans—the single most formidable force in the world.[26] It should come as no surprise, then, that Grossouvre’s most strident critics are to be found in those former left-wing Jewish ranks (as represented by Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Gluckmann, Alain Finkielkraut, etc.), who, like our home-grown neocons, champion the raceless, deculturated policies of Washington’s New World Order.

2. Francis Parker Yockey, The Enemy of Europe (Reedy, W.V,: Liberty Bell Publications, 1981). In this same period, a related argument can be found in the works of Maurice Bardèche, Julius Evola, Otto Strasser, and, later, Jean Thiriart.

13. In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle wrote: “The national era has come to an end and an age of [continental] empires is dawning.” See Révolution Nationale: Articles 1943–44 (Paris: L’Homme Libre, 2004), p. 7. Theoretically, the notion of a European Großraum was worked out in Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950); its most impressive programmatic formulation is Jean Thiriart, Un empire de 400 millions d’hommes: L’Europe (Brussels, 1964).

17. This treaty divided Charlemagne’s empire, separating the Germanic tribes of the West from those of the East. In one respect, the fratricidal history of nineteenth and twentieth century nationalism was a history of this separation.

21. Nikolai von Kreitor, “Russia and the New World Order” (1996). Published years before the Iraq war, Kreitor’s article is perhaps the single most important analysis to have been made of the international situation leading up to the war. My views here are much indebted to it.

25. One sign of this capacity is the fact that in 2003, Russia became the world’s number one arms exporter. See P. Schleiter, “Defense, securité, relations internationales” (April 25, 2004), http://www.polemia.com; also Yevgeny Bendersky, “Keep a Watchful Eye on Russia’s Military Technology” (July 21, 2004), http://www.pinr.com

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